Cattle Mutilations: A Tenative Solution

When a cow is in trouble, sick or dying, the first thing it experiences is peripheral circulatory shutdown. The peripheral, or outside circulation begins to shut down, this causes an immediate temperature reduction of the affected animal's outside skin. When a helicopter flies low and slow over area pastures and has the infra-red scanner operating, it will notice a cow with a lower thermographic reading than the others in the herd. Find the cold cow, and you've identified a cow in trouble. Somebody wants to know why that cow is in trouble. Since the cow will probably die anyway, it's a good choice for sample extraction. It's also a good way to narrow down farms that might be affected by disease.

This answers the question everybody always asks me: "Why wouldn't the government just go around and buy cows at the livestock sale, it would be cheaper than using helicopters. They could raise their own cattle on their own land and nobody would know about". That was always a hard question to answer, until now. There's no need to sample animals that don't appear to be at risk. If you are performing true epidemiology, you would go state to state and look for sick cows . You can't do that at a livestock sale, unless you marked the animals and came back and bought them after they were transported to the sales lot. Even then, you'd have no assurance the cow you'd marked would be offered up for sale. Furthermore, time is of the essence, an ailing cow might not ever make it to the sale. True epidemiology requires scanning as many cows as you could, in as many different areas. You'd have to do this over the entire continental U.S. to make accurate studies and samplings.

The vast majority of the cows that I found missing organs and tissues, had calved (given birth) within 2-3 weeks before being found dead. That's significant when we remember that BSE and CJD can also be hereditary diseases. In a couple of cases we investigated, the animal's blood had been thoroughly drained (exsanguinated) and there was no blood on the animals or on the ground. Early on in the scientific study of CJD & BSE, it was determined that body fluids were highly volatile and the scientists would drain the blood entirely after sedating the animal. A curare-like drug immediately immobilized the animals and the animal would die of blood loss.

This may explain why no veterinarian or laboratory was ever able to tell farmers or police, the animal's cause of death. That was always a big mystery. Now I believe some of the animals I examined, actually died of shock from blood loss. A curare-like drug is necessary to immediately incapacitate the animal, this prevents any struggle so the work can be carried out quickly. You don't want to stick around a long time and get caught by an irate farmer with a high powered rifle, that's why helicopters are the perfect vehicle to get in and out, fast. Because these cows identified through lower temperature signatures will probably die soon anyway, it's less of a moral issue for the teams performing the samplings.

Phil tells me that there are three different groups studying Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies. There is the public group, associated with Nobel Prize winner Stanley Prusiner. The second group is private and headed by a man whose name I will hold onto for the moment. The third is the government group, funded by a black budget. The groups don't always share information, so each is trying to figure out what the other is doing. By the 1960's, 112 different strains of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies had been identified. I don't have any information on how many have been identified today. I don't know if the strains identified here in the U.S. are more, or less dangerous than those still threatening Great Britain.

Conclusion
I don't pretend to explain every bovine excision case that's occurred across the country, I can only speak to those cases where I was directly involved in on-site investigations, working as a police officer. In 90% of the cases we investigated, helicopters were reported seen over the affected pastures the day before or after suspicious livestock deaths occurred. Because of the foreign substances found at the scene and in the bloodstreams of the animals, we (farmers and cops alike) suspected at that time there was some kind of medical testing being performed. With the new information I've been handed recently, described in this and my previous article, I am even more convinced that we were on the right track. That is the covert surveillance and study of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies across America. Now that this information has been put into the public's hands, the debate can begin.